We want to shut him down so he doesn't tear an ACL or break a collarbone or do anything that might endanger next season.
I don't think many people believe Philbin wants him shut down. Philin is auditioning for a HC job somewhere so he wants the best players on the field regardless of if it's good for the future of the franchise.
Sure it's not ideal to have to 'quit' at this point in the season, but if you sell it right it shouldn't be that big a deal. It's not too hard to understand there is nothing to play for if you can't make the playoffs. Sit and IR the vets and important players. Let young guys and bubble guys put out some NFL film as an audition for next year whether on the Packers or another team. They should appreciate the opportunity. Rodgers IS above the rest of the guys on the team, like it or not. He's paid $30m/yr for what he does and there isn't a player, coach, or groundcrew in 1265 that doesn't know that already.

I can only conclude one of two things, and neither is great. If the bolded, I'm worried about what that says about AR's confidence in his arm. Even if he thinks the underneath LB there is sitting on the throw, it's one he should be able to make in his sleep pre-2015, so not attempting for that reason makes me worry about the way his body is aging post-surgery and post-age-35.
The other option is that his mind is in full back-yard mode, and he thought he could get the corner to bite on the pump and have Davante run 'go' behind for the TD. If that's the case it's just as worrying because I don't know how you fix a 35 year old QB with that mindset before his body quits on him.

Yeah something like that- trying to get Cunningham's Law to work for me. The film breakdown guys here (including you increasingly over the years even though I wouldn't necessarily have called you that when I first saw you posting here) do a great job - but sometimes it feels like I see just as many or more film breakdowns in response to misleading narratives or takes than I see just posted on their own (I did like the threads AG and you made earlier in the year that more or less stood on their own though I think they might have been motivated in large part to respond to certain widely circulating claims about the offense and AR in general).

Yeah the conventional wisdom is that WR/secondary is a quick twitch game, which falls off sooner in general, whereas line play is more push/pull strength which tends to peak and decline at a later age (again in general).

Yes. From Determinants of Success in the National Football League's Postseason (Also titled How important is Previous Playoff Experience?) by Dr. Joshua Pitts published in the Journal of Sports Economics in 2014.

Not at all. Several statistician football writers have done exactly this by, for example, normalizing passer rating or ANY/A (any stat you want to approximate "QB Quality") for a year and then measuring relative distance above the mean in some way. Then look at how many years they led the league/were great and you have a decent way to approximate which QBs are most ahead of their contemporaries by the chosen metric.
It's been a few years since I've read these kinds of articles but off the top of my head I know Chase Stuart of Football Perspective had a series of great posts about his process that he updated every few years. A quick google gives this one (his fifth update from four years ago: http://www.footballperspective.com/the-greatest-qb-of-all-time-v-part-i-methodology/

Well Campbell is now a TE coach and didn't produce a better record than Philbin when given the chance, so I'm not sure if he's the authority on what culture works best to produce NFL success. Maybe this is a legitimate criticism, but maybe it's just one of those things where both styles have merit and the new guy didn't like the style the old guy used. As an outsider I can see merits to both sides. Going harder in practice might build a certain mindset or toughness you can't get elsewhere. It might also result in extra unnecessary injuries - you know the entire fandom would explode the minute the news broke that Bahktiari twisted his knee and was on IR after falling awkwardly in a 100% speed contact drill that not every team even runs.

I don't have a horse in this particular race but just gotta bang the drum again that 'per game' metrics are bad and we should use superior metrics if we want to have a sane conversation about offenses. Even if you don't like black box DVOA or advanced metrics like WPA/EPA there are better simple stats to look at than points/yards per game.
To take an extreme example: Is a ball-control offense that only gets the ball once per quarter (4 times a game) but scores a TD every time they get the ball while taking takes 10 minutes off the clock worse than an offense that gets the ball 3 times per quarter (12 per game) and only manages to score 5 TDs? Of course not - it's nearly impossible to beat the first ball-control team as they eat up 40 minutes of the game on offense and you can only tie them by scoring on every possible possession for the opposing team. Yet the inefficient 2nd team looks better on a 'per game' basis - they have 35 points (vs 28 for ball control team) and in terms of yards almost certainly have more from all their stalled drives that got a few first downs before punting, plus TD drives, while the 'ball control' team likely have no more than 300 total yards of offense (~ 75 yards for a TD each possession on a touchback).
Points per drive is the way to see which of these teams is better at scoring when they get the chance, given that teams can have wildly different situations based on many factors. The ball control team has 7 points per drive (TD each time) and the 'up tempo' offense has just 2.92 (this would actually be an excellent NFL offense - in the context of this example clearly inferior to the first team).
PPD takes important blind spots out of gross 'per game' metrics like game tempo, number of possessions, and defensive scoring. It can't account for everything (defensive strength, game situation, QB/key injuries, how much turnovers should count against the offense (these are just "0 point drives" but should arguably be negative)) but those are also weaknesses of per game stats also. If you want to account for even more nuance you're gonna have to start using EPA/WPA/DVOA etc.
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You can find PPD numbers for the entire league on Pro Football Reference. Just click on a year and scroll to the very last table for that year where there is a table called "Drive Averages." Click on the last column called "Pts" (points) and the table will sort in order of best-to-worst PPD for that year.
From an arbitrary point onwards, the years examined:
2013: NO-2.29 (3rd) GB 2.15 (6th)
2014: NO-2.3 (5th) GB 2.63 (1st)
2015: NO-2.14 (6th) GB 1.83 (19th)
2016: NO-2.59 (2nd) GB 2.47 (3rd)
2017: NO-2.41 (2nd) GB 1.79 (16th)
2018: NO-3.23 (1st) GB 2.1 (12th)

I vageuly recall reading some years ago that defenses typically show their biggest improvement in the first year of getting a new defensive coordinator. Unfortunately I can't find that study anymore through googling, so I was hoping someone here might be able to provide a similar article that looks at that premise of when you expect defenses to peak under a new DC. (Maybe I got it wrong and it's year two or three)?
If we can get an answer on that it might have a bearing on how we judge Pettine's performance so far.